novelraw Chapter 391: What Would Scare You
Chapter 391: What Would Scare You
Through the walls, Sera could hear the others reacting in their own ways.
Zubair’s silence weighed on her right, steady and hot. Knowing him, he would be sitting on the bunk with his back to the wall, his jaw locked, and his hands empty and itching for something to hold.
Alexei, on the other side somewhere, would be counting screws. Counting men. Counting breaths. Psycho murmuring in his ear, amused at the idea that they could be so easily caged.
Lachlan would be pacing in the small space until a voice yelled at him to sit. He would sit then, because he knew when to be obedient. His heel would bounce.
Elias would be still. Too still. Listening. Thinking. His creature cataloguing every change in airflow and electric hum even as it insulted him.
They were fine.
And for now, that was enough.
The scan continued its sweep.
The ceiling strip passed from her chest down to her abdomen. Kearns’s brows knit as the internal map built itself on the tablet—a ghost-image of organs, vessels, bones.
Sera watched her face, not the screen.
"You seem... confused. What do you see?" she asked.
Kearns hesitated.
"Health," she answered eventually. "Too much health. No scarring. No residual tissue damage, no micro-clots, no calcification. It’s like nothing bad ever happened inside you."
The smile on her face was twisted just enough that only Sera could ever knew what it meant. Only she knew better.
"I can assure you," she said softly. "I have had my fair share of bumps and bruises."
Kearns’s mouth tightened. "Then your body declined to remember those times."
Her creature purred. We remember. We remember everything. Just not how she wants us to.
Mercer’s voice cut in again.
"Compare to Navarre," he ordered. "Overlay sequences."
Kearns’s fingers moved quickly, pulling up another file. Elias’s internal map appeared beside Sera’s on the tablet, semi-translucent. The contrast made Kearns’s throat work.
Elias looked healthy.
Sera looked... untouched.
"His body show a history of violence," Kearns reported. "Old injuries, healed breaks, scar tissue. Typical for someone who lived through the first waves and... whatever he did before that."
"And the female?" Mercer asked.
"Her history isn’t in her body," Kearns murmured.
Sera’s creature liked that line. Very good, little medic. You are learning poetry by accident.
Mercer let a breath pass. "Log it. Move to stress metrics."
Kearns tensed. "Director—her stress readings are already abnormal."
"Abnormal how?" he prompted.
Kearns turned the tablet so he could see, even though he had his own feed. "She doesn’t spike. The normal markers—heart rate, cortisol proxies, micro-tremor, micro-sweat—they all sit in low ranges. Even under Level Four restraint and stimulus, she reads... bored."
The soldier nearest the door huffed quietly. "She doesn’t look bored."
Sera lifted one shoulder. "A little bored," she corrected. "Mostly curious."
Kearns glanced at her, then back up at the observation window. "If we push harder and she breaks, we might not get a second chance."
Panic, her creature translated. She fears wasting her specimen. How sweet.
Mercer remained still for a moment longer.
"You want me to be cautious," he concluded.
"I want you to remember we’re sealed in a metal box with something that isn’t reading as entirely human," Kearns replied, voice low.
Her honesty hung in the air like another alarm.
Mercer’s tone did not harden. It didn’t soften either. It remained what it always was: measured.
"Fear is useful until it stops you from learning," he answered. "You have protocols. Use them. Do not improvise. Do not escalate without data. She is not here to be provoked for your curiosity. She is here to be understood for mine."
Kearns flinched like the words had weight.
"Yes, Director."
The creature snorted softly in Sera’s mind. He owns their fear as well as their work. He’s very efficient when it comes to controlling his horde.
"Doctor," Mercer added, "keep the others under observation too. I want comparative baselines. Navarre, Zubair, Pierce, Morozov. If they respond to her scans, I want to know."
So he worried about contagion of another kind.
Sera exhaled, slow.
He thinks you are a stone dropped in his pool, the creature mused. Now he is just trying to figure out how far the ripples will go.
The alarm tone finally cut off.
Silence rushed in behind it, thick and almost physical. The red lights stayed on, but dimmed slightly. The bay was still locked; Sera could feel the lock in the way the air refused to move like it had before.
Routine, reclaimed after the flare.
"Stress panel," Kearns muttered, more to the tablet than to Sera. "We’ll start low. Audio prompts, cognitive load, memory triggers. Then move to physical."
"That sounds tedious," Sera commented.
Kearns’s mouth quirked despite herself. "Good. If you’re bored, you’re not panicking."
She queued up the first sequence.
A gentle tone chimed from the ceiling, different from the alarms. It was a testing noise, neutral and hollow. A line of text scrolled across the small display under the camera:
RESPOND YES / NO
Sera frowned. "You want me to talk to your wall?"
"Out loud is fine," Kearns answered. "The system picks up vocal response. It measures reaction speed and content."
The creature yawned theatrically. They ask simple questions to see if we flinch. Even I am starting to get bored.
"Do you understand that you are in containment?" the wall inquired, voice flat.
"Yes," Sera replied.
A soft beep acknowledged the answer.
"Do you feel threatened?"
She considered that.
"Not yet," she decided.
The delay mattered more to the system than the word.
Graphs twitched on Kearns’s screen, showing micro-changes in pulse, breath, pupil dilation. They stayed low.
"Do you wish to leave?"
"Yes."
Another beep.
Kearns watched the lines. "No jump. No agitation. Her markers barely shift."
"Continue," Mercer instructed.
The questions continued, irrelevant and basic.
"Do you feel pain?"
"No."
"Do you feel fear?"
"No."
"Do you feel anger?"
"I’m a little hungry," Sera shrugged.
That made the soldier near the glass snort before he caught himself.
Kearns rubbed a hand over her face, tension coiled in her neck. "We’re not hitting any thresholds," she reported. "The system is treating her like a sedated patient even though she’s fully conscious."
"Sera," Mercer’s voice dropped through the speaker, skipping the wall prompts. "What would scare you?"
The restraints tightened a hair, anticipating movement.
Her creature perked up, intrigued. That is a better question.
Sera angled her head toward the camera. "Why do you want to know?"
"If I understand your limits," Mercer replied, "I know where to build the fences."
"Do you build them to keep things in," she wondered, "or to keep you safe on your side?"
"Both," he answered. No hesitation.
That honesty again.
She thought about it for a long moment.